Openness and Impact of Leading Scientific Countries

The rapid rise of international collaboration over the past three decades, demonstrated in coauthorship of scientific articles, raises the question of whether countries benefit from cooperative science and how this might be measured. We develop and compare measures to ask this question. For all source publications in 2013, we obtained from Elsevier national-level full and fractional paper counts as well as accompanying field-weighted citation counts. Then we collected information from Elsevier on the percent of all internationally coauthored papers for each country, as well as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures of the international mobility of the scientific workforce in 2013, and conducted a principle component analysis that produced an openness index. We added data from the OECD on government budget allocation on research and development (GBARD) for 2011 to tie in the public spending that contributed to the 2013 output. We found that openness among advanced science systems is strongly correlated with impact—the more internationally engaged a nation is in terms of coauthorships and researcher mobility, the higher the impact of scientific work. The results have important implications for policy making around investment, as well as the flows of students, researchers, and technical workers

Measure of National Return in International Science Cooperation

In the decades since science and technology measures were crafted and adopted by governments, R&D has increasingly taken place across national boundaries. This leaves a gap for policy makers in how to account for the benefits to national governments of supporting international collaboration in science. This article seeks to address this gap by suggesting a measure for the impact of international collaboration in science using fractionalized field-weighted citations and analysing these in relationship to public spending and researcher mobility

A Multidimensional Framework for Measuring Scientific Leadership

Scientific progress has been one of the critical concerns of many nations in recent decades. It has become one of the top priorities at the highest policy-making levels in several countries. During the last two decades, several policies have been developed to achieve scientific progress and leadership in different parts of the world. For example, China, Japan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have designed their policies to accelerate scientific progress and achieve scientific leadership in a specific region. However, there is no comprehensive framework to measure the extent of scientific leadership in theory or practice. This study proposes a multidimensional framework for measuring scientific leadership in countries through a qualitative approach. To address this objective, key dimensions, indicators, and metrics for measuring scientific leadership were identified in the literature and policy documents. After the identification of these dimensions, indicators, and metrics, they were verified and weighted by different expert panels. According to the findings, a comprehensive framework for measuring scientific leadership includes five dimensions and 22 indicators and metrics. Results showed that “institutions” is more important than other dimensions in the framework. Since the nature of “scientific leadership” concept is more political than scientific, considering dimensions and indicators covered by the media is a more effective way to measure it. The findings of this study can give policymakers a more comprehensive and accurate view of the concept of scientific leadership and assist them in various planning and research policies. In addition, the proposed framework is the basis for future research seeking to assess scientific leadership quantitatively.https://dorl.net/dor/20.1001.1.20088302.2022.20.4.19.

SCOPES: Sparking curiosity through Open-Source platforms in education and science

Scientific research is to date largely restricted to wealthy laboratories in developed nations due to the necessity of complex and expensive equipment. This inequality limits the capacity of science to be used as a diplomatic channel. Maker movements use open-source technologies including additive manufacturing (3D printing) and laser cutting, together with low-cost computers for developing novel products. This movement is setting the groundwork for a revolution, allowing scientific equipment to be sourced at a fraction of the cost and has the potential to increase the availability of equipment for scientists around the world. Science education is increasingly recognized as another channel for science diplomacy. In this perspective, we introduce the idea that the Maker movement and open-source technologies have the potential to revolutionize science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education worldwide. We present an open-source STEM didactic tool called SCOPES (Sparking Curiosity through Open-source Platforms in Education and Science). SCOPES is self-contained, independent of local resources, and cost-effective. SCOPES can be adapted to communicate complex subjects from genetics to neurobiology, perform real-world biological experiments and explore digitized scientific samples. We envision such platforms will enhance science diplomacy by providing a means for scientists to share their findings with classrooms and for educators to incorporate didactic concepts into STEM lessons. By providing students the opportunity to design, perform, and share scientific experiments, students also experience firsthand the benefits of a multinational scientific community. We provide instructions on how to build and use SCOPES on our webpage: http://scopeseducation.org

Is culture related to strong science? An empirical investigation

National culture is among those societal factors which could influence research and innovation activities. In this study, we investigated the associations of two national culture models with citation impact of nations (measured by the proportion of papers belonging to the 10 % and 1 % most cited papers in the corresponding fields, PPtop10% and PPtop 1%). Bivariate statistical analyses showed that of six Hofstede’s national culture dimensions (HNCD), uncertainty avoidance and power distance had a statistically significant negative association, while individualism and indulgence had a statistically significant positive association with both citation impact indicators (PPtop10% and PPtop1%). The study also revealed that of two Inglehart-Welzel cultural values (IWCV), the value survival versus self-expression is statistically significantly related to both citation impact indicators (PPtop10% and PPtop 1%). We additionally calculated multiple regression analyses controlling for the possible effects of confounding factors including national self-citations, international co-authorships, investments in research and development, international migrant stock, number of researchers of each nation, language, and productivity. The results revealed that the statistically significant associations of HNCD with citation impact indicators disappeared. But the statistically significant relationship between survivals versus self-expression values and both citation impact indicators remained stable even after controlling for the confounding variables. Thus, the freedom of expression and trust in society might contribute to better scholarly communication systems, higher level of international collaborations, and further quality research.publishedVersio

Disentangling international research collaboration in the Spanish academic context: Is there a desirable researcher human capital profile?

A number of studies has focused on examining those academic researchers attributes-demographics or not- that condition international research collaboration (IRC) and its results. However, it is not possible to speak about an ‘ideal’ type of researcher so far. Should we assume that just only those ‘star researchers’ collaborate internationally?. The literature is not clear enough on this topic, offering interesting but insufficient support to know the set of individual characteristics that ensures fruitful IRC. To deepen the analysis of academic researchers attributes, in particular, the human capital characteristics, this study proposes in-depth research on exploring different combinations on human capital dimensions and testing potential differences in IRC levels. To do so, from an exploratory perspective, a cluster analysis was conducted in a sample of 937 Spanish academics, obtaining three researcher profiles: (1) consolidated international research collaborators, (2) effective international research collaborators, and (3) skilled international research collaborators. Far from the recurrent analysis of single or disconnected researchers' attributes, this paper contributes to the extant literature with a new typology based on the variables of academic human capital, providing an useful starting point to better understand who really can develop international networks to collaborate and, therefore, how to foster IRC in Universitie

How collaborative is Indian academia? A case study of top three ranked institutions

66-74The present study employs bibliometric methods to examine the pattern of existing collaboration in India’s top three ranked academic institutes using publications indexed in the Web of Science for the period 2000 to 2020. The results show although the number of collaborations and the degree of collaboration have increased over time, however, the collaboration coefficient remains almost the same in the three institutes. The lesser negative Pearson correlation between authors and articles with a higher positive Pearson correlation between articles and citations for JNU publications suggests that collaboration with a smaller group is more successful than a larger group for gaining citations. Collaborative publications of Banaras Hindu University (36%) and Indian Institute of Science (33%) are more inclined towards authors of the same department, while for Jawaharlal Nehru University, it is with other authors from different universities (41%). The foreign collaboration for all three institutes is almost the same. The network visualization of collaboration in three institutes suggests that the collaborative research in IISc is more diverse than JNU or BHU and in national collaboration, distance between two national organizations also play an important role for strong collaboration. Overall, theoretical aspects of physics lead in collaborative publications followed by chemical sciences. Agricultural biotechnology, clinical medicine, polymer sciences and nanoscience are some emerging disciplines where organizations are increasing their participation through collaborative research

A comparative analysis of the publication behaviour of MSCA fellows

MSCA applicants from South and Eastern European countries underperform researchers from North Western Europe before receiving the grant. However, the median difference disappears by the time of the grant and in the period after this. Due to a higher number of outliers (top performers) among the researchers from North Western Europe, the mean impact scores do remain significantly higher